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Syria chemical weapons inspection to start Tuesday
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The inspectors responsible for tracking down Syria’s chemical arms stockpile and verifying its destruction plan to start in Syria next Tuesday.
They will face their tightest deadlines ever and work right in the heart of a war zone, according to a draft decision which is the key to any UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons program.
The five permanent members of the deeply divided UN Security Council reached agreement on Thursday on a resolution to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons. A vote depends on how soon the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was meeting later yesterday at its headquarters in The Hague, can adopt its plan for securing and destroying Syria’s stockpile.
The draft agreed upon by Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain includes two legally binding demands — that Syria abandons its chemical stockpile and allows unfettered access to the chemical weapons experts.
If Syria fails to comply, the draft says the Security Council would need to adopt a second resolution to impose possible military and other actions on Damascus under Chapter Seven of the UN charter.
Issam Khalil, a member of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s ruling Baath party, portrayed the deal as an American diplomatic failure.
“The resolution does not include threats or even possibilities of misinterpretations in a way that would let America and its allies to take advantage of it as they did in Iraq,” Khalil said.
The diplomatic push to find some agreement on Syria was triggered by an August 21 poison gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians in a Damascus suburb and US President Barack Obama’s subsequent threat to use military force.
The US and Russia agree that Syria has roughly 1,000 tons of chemical weapons agents and precursors, including blister agents such as sulfur and mustard gas and nerve agents like sarin.
A group of UN inspectors already on the ground in Syria investigating the alleged use of chemical weapons said yesterday they are probing a total of seven sites of suspected attacks, including the Damascus suburb where hundreds were killed last month. That number was raised from three sites.
The proposal being discussed yesterday by the OPCW would allow inspectors into any site suspected of chemical weapons involvement even if Syria’s government did not identify the location. That gives the inspectors unusually broad authority.
The draft calls for the organization’s secretariat to start inspections “as soon as possible and no later than” Tuesday and sets a target of destroying all of Syria’s chemical weapons and equipment by the first half of 2014.
It calls on Syria to “cooperate fully with all aspects of the implementation of this decision” and let the inspectors examine any location they choose.
Once the plan is approved, it gives Damascus a week to give detailed information on its arsenal, including the name and quantity of all chemicals in its stockpile; the type and quantity of munitions that can be used to fire chemical weapons and the location of weapons, storage facilities and production facilities.
All chemical weapons production and mixing equipment should be destroyed no later than November 1.
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